Her expression did not alter and we sat again without speaking, until at last, ever conscious of the time as I had become under the regime of Morgan’s constant clock-watching, I rose and said, ‘I have asked Eva to visit you for half an hour of her spare time. She will bring some needlework to keep you occupied.’
Her face relaxed. ‘I unremember if that is something I can do but I have a strong feeling it is not.’
‘In that case Eva will instruct you. It is part of the Moral Treatment to keep you occupied. It does not do for the mind to dwell on things.’
She made no reply but turned her head and looked out the window again, exactly as she had been doing when I came in. ‘I will see you again soon,’ I said, pushing back my chair and getting to my feet. She did not respond and I found that when I went out I instinctively closed the door quietly behind me so as not to disturb her meditation again.
For the rest of the day I was preoccupied with the letter from Caroline Adams, so much so that during the exercise hour I hardly spoke to Jane Dove. She in turn seemed to be lost in her own thoughts. It was only when the bell rang to signal that the session was over and we were turning back toward the building that she broke the silence. I realised it was the first time she had ever initiated a conversation between us.
‘I was thinking …’ she began, then stopped and licked her lips nervously.
‘Yes …?’ This was said gently. She had never so far ventured to tell me any of her thoughts and I did not want to pressure her, which instinct told me would only make her clam up. I continued walking beside her, looking down at the ground, as if what she had to say was of no consequence at all to me, unless she wished it to be.
She cleared her throat. ‘I was thinking about what you said concerning reading.’ She paused and I simply nodded to encourage her to continue. ‘As I have told you, it is unpermissioned. But looking at books is not.’
I was, I admit, slow to follow and my response was crass. ‘But there’s not much point if you can’t read.’
She stopped and turned and looked me boldly in the face. ‘But some books have pictures in them, do they not? I think I would like to study the pictures.’
This was an interesting development and no mistake. ‘Very well, we will go now to the library and see what we can find.’
On the way I tried to make up for my earlier ignoring of her by engaging her in conversation, even though all I seemed capable of was the most pathetic kind of small talk. After all, what does one say to a lunatic one hardly knows? I asked her how she found her room and whether she was enjoying the better food now, to both of which she replied enthusiastically and gratefully, although I could tell only half her mind was on what she was saying. I saw she was eager to get to the library.
Once there, I indicated the bookshelves with a sweep of my arm and told the girl to help herself. I said I, too, would look for books with prints or colour plates in them. I began at the shelves where the non-fiction books were ranged – but not the medical, which I did not feel at all suitable for a young woman or likely to be beneficial to anyone with a mental affliction. After flicking through a few volumes, I came across a book of Audubon’s pictures of birds in gorgeous colour plates and quite lost myself in admiring the vividness of the hues, the reds and yellows of exotic parrots and the lifelike rendering of the creatures, and so failed to pay attention to what the girl was up to. I suppose this was because I was not a trained medical man; I had not learned to put the patient first. Thinking about it, I do not know whether as a human being I ever learned to put another person before myself.
Eventually, though, I looked up from the bird book, eager to show it to her, since I was excited to find something that so exactly answered our purpose, a book full of beautiful and colourful images that would give her great pleasure to sit and study. To my surprise, I saw the girl was over at the shelves containing fiction, staring into an open book she had in her hands.
‘I doubt you’ll find much there,’ I called across to her.
She looked over her shoulder at me. ‘On the contrary, sir, I have goldstruck. There are many books here I should like.’
I closed the Audubon and, still holding it, walked over to her. She held out the book she was looking at and I saw there was a black and white print on the page. I put the Audubon under my arm and took the other book from her. The picture showed a little girl sitting on a beach, and behind her an inverted boat with a chimney emitting smoke poking up from what had once been the hull and was now the roof. I recognised it immediately as the Peggotty house from David Copperfield in the original Phiz illustration.
‘Yes, that’s something.’ I flicked through the rest of the volume. ‘But there aren’t many pictures, considering it’s such a long book.’
‘There are enough for me,’ she replied. ‘And the length of the book unconsequences; I will not be looking at the other pages.’
I closed the Dickens and swapped it for the Audubon, which I opened, flicking through the pages, revealing a cascade of colour. ‘Would you not prefer this? The whole book is made up of pictures; there is more for you to look at.’
She eyed the book suspiciously. ‘I think I would rather the other one.’
‘Are you sure? Why would you not like this?’
‘Does it contain a picture of a rook?’
I consulted the index, found that it did and turned to the appropriate page. I held it out to her.
She turned her head away. ‘In that case, I should unlike it. I unlike rooks. I would unlike to sit in my room and look at a picture of one.’
I became exasperated. ‘But that’s craz—’ I began and then realised that this sort of oddness was only to be expected; the girl was here, after all, because she was mad. ‘Forgive me. The point I’m trying to make is that just because there’s a picture of a rook in the book, it doesn’t mean you have to look at it.’
‘Ah, but, sir, I would know it was there.’
I sighed. ‘Very well.’ I swapped the books over again. ‘But what is the use of this other book that has pictures to illustrate a story, one you cannot follow without reading it?’
‘I may not be able to read it but I can sit and look at them and make up my own stories. I can look at the picture of that funny upside-down boat and try to imagine the kind of people who live in it. It will while away many an hour for me, up there, alone in my room.’
I wondered for a moment whether this would be good for her, sitting and making things up, fashioning for herself a fantasy world to retreat into, when surely what I should be doing was getting her to engage with real life. But when I saw her looking at me with such an eager expression, eyes shining bright, cheeks flushed with excitement, the pulse beating in that lovely long white neck, I hadn’t the heart to refuse. Besides, I had spent my whole life taking people into worlds of make-believe for a few hours here and there and who was I to argue it might be bad for them? Didn’t we all need to escape the harsh realities of the world sometimes, and didn’t this poor girl more than most?
I smiled. ‘All right, you can have that one.’
She laid her fingers on the back of my hand, the one that held the book and said, ‘Oh thank you, thank you, sir. I cannot tell you how I grateful you.’
We stood like that, her hand upon mine, like a butterfly that had landed there, saying nothing, until of a sudden it became awkward and, at the same instant, we both snatched our hands away.
11
This progress with my special patient gladdened me for all of twenty minutes after I had left her in her room and then, once again, I felt an undertow of dread as I remembered the business of the letter. I racked my brains for what to do. The first thought was to flee immediately, but the problem was, where to? Although I was reasonably certain I was officially dead, that would not prevent a policeman recognising me. I had insufficient money to hide myself away for long. Shepherd had had very little cash upon his person. As for coming by any more, my former profession was closed to me for ever.
I could hardly put myself on display to the general public and not expect someone to recognise me after all the newspaper coverage. And anyway, it was like any other trade, a small world in which everyone knew everyone else. Even if I could manage to disguise myself in some way it wouldn’t help. In my line, name and reputation were what got you work, things I had built up over years of hard graft. Without them I would have to start at the bottom again and I might go months without landing something.
No, my only hope was to do what had sprung into my mind immediately after the train wreck, as soon as I looked in Shepherd’s jacket pocket and found the letter from Morgan offering him a job at the hospital. To lie low here, amass a little capital and then, when everyone had all but forgotten me, head out west to some obscure place where no one knew me and look for some new enterprise. In the meantime, all I had to do was to control myself, to make sure I did not get into any trouble of the old sort, which so far, I congratulated myself, I had been able to do. It looked as if the survival instinct had triumphed over all my normal – or should I say abnormal? – inclinations.
So there was nothing for it. One way or another I had to solve the problem of Caroline Adams. If she received no reply to her letter, she would show up here next week and all would be up. But how could I reply to her? The handwriting would give me away.
In the course of my often precarious career I’ve once or twice been forced to forge another person’s writing and reckoned I could do so now, if only I could find a sample of Shepherd’s hand. So as soon as dinner was finished I made my excuses to Morgan and slipped away to my room. There I turned Shepherd’s valise inside out. I examined every bit of it. I even took my razor and made a slit in the lining just on the off chance he might have hidden something there, although what and why I did not know. Nothing!
I went through the clothes, item by item, but they held no surprises. Then I remembered there had been a few pencilled notes in the margins of Moral Treatment and took it up and began feverishly thumbing through it. I studied them long and hard but they were simply scrawled phrases from which it would be difficult to formulate an individual style. They offered no reliable guide to how the man wrote a letter in pen and ink, nor would I have the least idea how he signed his name. I struggled for a while, examining each note in turn, comparing the individual letters and even taking a pen and copying them one by one, trying to assemble them into a viable script. I had just begun to think I might be getting somewhere when I was thrown into utter despair as another thought occurred to me: how did I even know these notes were Shepherd’s? He could have borrowed the book or been given it by someone else who had made the marginalia. I tossed my pen down in defeat. How could I forge what I had never seen?
Then I recalled my first day there, in Morgan’s office, when he picked up the letter from his desk, the letter I was supposed to have written. He must still have that letter now; he was such a fussy, precise, methodical man it was not at all possible he would have thrown it away. Ergo all I had to do was get hold of it and copy the writing. I leapt from my chair in jubilation and then at once slumped back heavily onto it as I realised that gaining possession of the letter was easier said than done.
The first thought I had was to simply go to Morgan and ask for it. He could hardly refuse. The trouble was I couldn’t come up with any justification for doing that. He’d be bound to ask me why I wanted it and there was no logical reason. No, if I wanted the letter, I would have to steal it.
I lay on my bed in a real funk for the next couple of hours waiting for everyone to retire for the night. I listened as one by one the sounds of the place faded – patients wailing, their unearthly ghostly caterwauling, and the attendants barking out their orders and remonstrances – until there was nothing but the occasional lone cry, and the creaking of the house putting itself to rest, settling down upon its ancient complaining joists, accompanied from outside by the whispered comments of the wind.
When I was quite sure no one was about, I rose from my bed, lit a candle and set about my task. I had spent much of the last few hours making an inventory of the contents of my room in my head, trying to think whether it contained anything with which to pick a lock – a pin or needle perhaps – but nothing had occurred and I cursed myself for having returned the cheese knife to the kitchen. Now I went through the same search physically, looking in every nook and cranny, without any luck. In the end I set off on my quest with no great hope. If Morgan’s office were locked, then I would fall at the first hurdle.
Once again the night-time corridors of the old house filled me with dread of what might lurk in its dark corners, my hair on end at the moaning of some distant lunatic, and from without, the answering hoot of an owl. I shivered at the thought of how close I had come to death, how recently we had rubbed shoulders twice, how he had had his icy hand upon my collar, only for the most spectacular piece of chance to allow me to wriggle free. In the near blackness now, part of me knew that this was not the end of the matter, that he might be here in the shadows, biding his time until the right moment to claim me came.
I reached the front hall and Morgan’s office. As I stretched out my hand for the doorknob, it shook uncontrollably, like a sick old man’s. I almost dared not touch the brass for fear of failure, but there was nothing for it and in the end I gripped the handle and turned – and lo and behold the door swung open. It had not been locked. I told myself what a fool I had been to let myself get so worked up about it. After all, why would Morgan want to lock his office? It was out of bounds to the patients, which left only the attendants, and since it almost certainly contained nothing but records and papers, what interest would they have had in poking about in it? Which left, of course, only me.
I stepped inside, closed the door gently behind me and set to work. There were four wooden filing cabinets along one wall and I placed my candleholder on top of the first and started in on it. As I had expected, everything was as meticulously arranged as Morgan’s appearance, as neat and tidy as his necktie or his moustache. In the first cabinet I found the patient records, in alphabetical order. The next seemed to contain all the administrative paperwork for the hospital. There were lists of purchases of food and clothing, copies of contracts with suppliers and so on. This might hold information that could be useful to me at another time but was not what I was after now. My heart leapt when I discovered that the third cabinet contained correspondence. The final file in the top drawer of the three ended at ‘H’, and thus I figured ‘S’ would reside in the bottom one and skipped out the middle. My surmise proved correct and I began flicking through the files, finding Shackleton, Shadrack, Sheedy and … Shipton. There was no Shepherd. I went back to the beginning of ‘S’ and worked my way through every bit of paper in it. Perhaps Morgan had misfiled it, or rather not Morgan, you could not imagine him ever making such an error, but the secretary who would have done the filing for him. I knew it was a long shot but I was desperate. It wasn’t there. Despondently I closed the drawer and proceeded to the fourth and final cabinet, knowing it would surely be a waste of time. I saw at once it was what I was looking for; the files in it were related to the staff.
I was flicking through them, looking for ‘S’, when the name O’Reilly jumped out at me. I stood still and listened for a moment. Utter silence. In spite of the danger I was running, I couldn’t resist taking out the file and looking through it. There were a couple of letters of reference, and I was surprised to find these were not, as you might have expected, from other mental hospitals or even medical establishments. One was from a hotel, where she had worked as a chambermaid, the other from a county jail, where she had been employed as a turnkey, which I supposed might give her a qualification of sorts to work in a mental asylum, but did not explain how she had risen to the position of chief attendant. Reading her record, I found details of her salary which struck me as seeming about right for the work involved, and I was just about to close the file when I saw a note: ‘June 1893. $20 payment for “special services”
.’ Below that was another, the same amount only this time labelled ‘July’. I turned the pages and found these payments went back some two years, regular as clockwork every month, the only alteration having come some six months ago, when the payment was increased from $15 to $20. What ‘special services’ could O’Reilly be providing that commanded such a huge sum? All I could think of – perhaps suggested by the term ‘special services’ – was something of a carnal nature, except that Morgan was much too fastidious for anything squalid and, it had to be said, O’Reilly was too unattractive both in appearance and person to be the object of anyone’s lust.
My mind was in a whirl and I had almost forgotten where I was when I suddenly came to my senses. Had I heard something? I wasn’t sure. I could not risk being caught here simply because of idle curiosity. Whatever O’Reilly and Morgan had going on between them was none of my concern. It did not affect my situation. The important thing now was what I had come for. I stood still and breathed as softly as I could for two or three minutes, until I decided there’d been nothing after all, or perhaps only some sound made by the wind outside, and so deemed it safe to continue my search. I replaced O’Reilly’s folder and moved on, hoping to find my own staff file, but when I reached the letter ‘S’ there was nothing for Shepherd.
I closed the cabinet and asked myself what a file about me would contain. I had been here such a short time, after all. All there was written down about me was contained in that one letter of application and perhaps a copy of Morgan’s reply to it, and there probably wasn’t enough for him to have started a file on me yet. If that were the case, that the letter had not been filed away, there was only one other place it might be: still on Morgan’s desk.
I took my candle and placed it there. I sat down in Morgan’s chair to give myself his view of it, so that all the papers were the right way round and easy to examine. There were plenty of them. I began leafing through. They were mainly letters and, since a letter was what I was searching for and I had no idea what it might look like, I had to go over them one by one, reading just enough of each to make sure it was not from the person I was supposed to be.